June 9, 2017 Albuquerque, New Mexico - On Thursday, June 1, 2017, John Burroughs and I co-hosted a PHENOMENON Radio 2-hour live broadcast on KGRA with investigative national security reporter Annie Jacobsen about her latest book released in May 2017 entitled: PHENOMENA: The Secret History of the U. S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception (ESP) and Psychokinesis (PK).

Linda Moulton Howe and John Burroughs, Co-Host PHENOMENON Radio LIVE every Thursday at 5 PM Pacific/
8 PM EST on digital broadcaster KGRA.

Annie, I really did feel that one of the strangest episodes in your book is what took place at Lawrence Livermore where some of the lab scientists saw weird holograms and orbs of light in their houses at night. In your book on Page 181, I remember some quotes that you had in your discussion with Kit Green, M. D., about what happened. Here are the quotes from Dr. Green:

“Rational or irrational, two nuclear scientists who worked on U. S. nuclear weapons programs at Livermore, they left the lab because of these holograms and these orbs. Weapons programs at Livermore, they left the lab because of these holograms and these orbs. As far as I know, two of the Livermore scientists quit,” and it was because the scientists had apparently perceived the incidents to be some kind of omen or message, “that they were not supposed to work on nuclear weapons development anymore.” Close Quote, Kit Green, M. D.

Annie: I know. It's remarkable that he said that, and it's a very interesting summation. And this is coming from the person who interviewed those scientists as a CIA neurobiologists sent by CIA security in liaison with the Atomic Energy Commission.

Linda: When you were talking with Kit Green about this — did you talk with him, maybe even privately outside of what's on the printed page — about all the work that he has done with people, who have interacted with the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), and that it has left impacts on their physiology and in their minds?

Did you talk with him about this whole issue of an alien intelligence apparently inserting itself, not only at Lawrence Livermore, but out in the Minuteman missile fields in the 1960s and 1970s, where military people there concluded that something wants to shut our nuclear missiles down?

Annie: Well, Dr. Green would never use that language. I mean, that's not how he rolls. He's a very specific speaker, and he's very careful with his words. So everything that he has told me on the record is quotable, and I always interview with a tape recorder, and I always give sources opportunities when something really sort of radical is said like, “Are we clear that this is in this context,” because I think that's fair.

I'm never going to be a gotcha reporter. But no, Green would never speak of an alien intelligence using those words. What he thinks about the source, I write — I quote him in the book in his very scientific erudite way, he suggests a number of things. But I do think it's best to take him at his word. Interestingly, reporters working with sources talk a lot on what's called “on background.” And that is a way in which to give context to certain situations, but not necessarily quote because it's context. And so, yes, I do lots and lots of interviews with people where I get a sense of what they might think about things.

And again, that informs me and my representation of them as a protagonist, as you said. But I really think it's important to let people deliver information that they've spent decades working on in the manner that they're comfortable with. And that's why I rely heavily on quoting people accurately as they said it.

Qigong and Mystery of H. S. Tsien

Well, going to someone who has partnered with Dr. Green so much over the last three or four decades is Hal Puthoff, Ph.D. physicist. In your chapter “Qigong and the Mystery of H. S. Tsien” (father of rockets and spaceflight) ...

Annie: His name is pronounced, or rather anglicized, as Tsien Hsue-shen.

[ Editor's Note: Chinese Air Force Colonel Tsien Hsue-shen was an aeronautic and mechanical engineer, who graduated the top of 161 from the National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai at the School of Mechanics. In August 1935, Tsien won the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship and went to study mechanics and aeronautics in the United States. In 1937, Tsien obtained his Master's Degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tsien made contributions for Allies to the victory of the World War II East Asian battlefield.

After the end of WWII, Tsien and his family settled in the United States. Due to the unstable atmosphere of the following Cold War and China's extreme turmoil, Tsien naturalized as an American citizen after 1949. Tsien later served as the chief engineer of Boeing. In 1997, Tsien succumbed to cancer in California at age 83.]

Project Grill Flame

Military Use of Remote Viewing and the CIA FOIA Documents,
Project Star Gate.
See Websites below.

OK, and in this chapter you introduce Grill Flame as being one of the Special Access Projects (SAP) that Hal Puthoff worked in for the government for the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA. He went to China. Can you explain what occurred with Hal Puthoff in Grill Flame? That was October 1981.

Annie: Yes. And you know, again, I want to remind the listeners, that when you're talking about Hal Puthoff, and you're talking about Kit Green, you're talking about two individuals who had TS/SCI, that's Top Secret/ Secret Compartmentalized Information clearances since the late 1960s. John Burroughs knows about this.

So these are very long serving government individuals as contractor scientists. So it's really remarkable to think of how trusted these individuals are. Hal Puthoff shared with me that he continues to work on black programs for the government today. He is 80 years old. Now, that is a valuable scientist who has not yet retired, OK? And you know, Puthoff's story is so interesting on so many levels, but again, Linda, you've picked up something on the book which I am again amazed that in all the radio interviews I've done about the book and television, no one else seems to have picked up on how remarkable it is that Hal Puthoff went to China.

Linda: Yes!

Annie: As you know, he was sort of disguised, literally. His cover was that he was just an ordinary scientist embedded with a group of journalists, when in fact, he was on a mission from the CIA and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, specifically to try and gather information on the then burgeoning ESP and PK programs in China that were remarkably led by Tsien Hsue-shen, also called H.S. Tsien. Now, that may not strike anyone as a common household name, but I assure you Tsien Hsue-shen is a major player. He was one of the original founders of the American Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, NASA's rocket propulsion laboratory. Tsien Hsue-shen was ranked Colonel of the Republic of China Air Force during WWII. He was the man in charge of interviewing Wernher von Braun (aerospace engineer from Hitler's rocket scientists in WWII) about rockets when von Braun was captured (in Germany) after the Reich fell.

I mean, he was a major player in U.S. national security and intelligence. And during the McCarthy era, he became a target of an FBI investigation. He was so insulted that in an exchange through the State Department with some POWs in North Korea, Tsien Hsue-shen went back to China. Boy, did he spend the rest of his life as a diehard communist determined to bring China up to snuff in terms of rockets, satellites, and marrying nuclear weapons to ICBMs. And he did it all almost single-handedly. I tell the story of Tsien Hsue-shen in the book. And so in 1979 when the CIA learns that China has an ESP/P and even teleportation program, this is astonishing because Chairman Mao has been anti all of this.

So why did it happen? Well, Hal Puthoff is sent to investigate, and what he can confirm is that Tsien Hsue-shen, the former U.S. JPL cofounder, is the man behind all of it. And I mean, the tension that you could feel — that I felt — reading the CIA documents about this program, their discovery that Tsien Hsue-shen was behind it was remarkable. And it was extraordinary to be able to interview Hal Puthoff about this journey and hear his take on it and listen to him describe to me.

Teleportation Between Twin Chinese Brothers

Puthoff told me he saw a pair of two Chinese boys, who were twin brothers that could teleport nuts, little seeds between their pockets. Hal had some remarkable memories. It was really a privilege to interview him about this.

Linda: Annie, did Hal indicate that he thought the teleporting of the nuts between the kids' pockets was the same kind of force that everybody has been trying to understand is behind ESP and PK?

Annie: Yes. And in his scientific nomenclature, he stated that he actually saw it, OK. That's a first-person witnessing POV. What he saw, he does not know and does not claim to know. I mean, was it teleportation as in sort of science fiction teleportation? Was it him seeing — did they have an effect on his mind? In the book, I write about his interpretation on that. All kinds of theories about, but this is that area of what the Chinese have been working on for thousands of years.

I mean, they call it qigong, vital energy. And Tsien Hsue-shen, in a declassified document I was able to have translated from Chinese, declares at this national security symposium in China that this is how the East will beat the West because China knows about such things as anomalous mental powers going all the way back to the I Ching, The Book of Changes in 1,000 BC. And this again freaked the CIA out. I mean, you have Tsien Hsue-shen saying this is how we're going to beat the West!

Linda:You have a quote from Dr. Jack Verona at DIA about all of the ESP/PK in China. China was added to a list of national security threats and Verona said, “A potential threat to U. S. national security exists from foreign achievements in psychoenergetics in the USSR and China.”

Annie: That's right. You're absolutely right. And that's the moment where China gets added onto the Psychic Arms Race List. And it really is a remarkable one. And psychoenergetics, by the way, is just a sort of fancy dressed up name for psychokinesis. I found it remarkable tracking the nomenclature, the language changes, throughout the various decades as all these different scientists try to sort of distance themselves from what they consider sort of a hokey term from the past. And it's so interesting because it's all just ESP or psychokinesis, but no one ever wants to call it that. So they create these names that are very apropos to the decade in which they exist.

As you talked about in your introduction, Linda, now you have the Office of Naval Research running ESP programs and calling them Advanced Perceptual Competences. And Perceptual Training Tools. I mean, these are 21st century terms for ESP. Psychoenergetics was a 1980s term.

Linda:Would the Chinese word spelled Qi in your book ...

Annie: Qi, yes.

Linda: Would you say that the Chinese perception of Qi and what Hal Puthoff was learning on that trip for Grill Flame would be identical to, let's say, the force that Uri Geller and Ingo Swann were dealing with in the experimentations at SRI in Livermore?

Annie: Well, again, you've hit upon this very enigmatic sort of puzzle because on the one hand Qi to the Chinese — they have not changed their nomenclature.

They are clear about what they believe that is — that it's energy. But you know, that is a no-no in the West. And so is it what Uri Geller has? Is it what remote viewer Pat Price had? Is it what Angela Dellafiora, the DIA's top psychic, has? You know, that's subject to interpretation.

Controlled Remote Viewer Pat Price

Linda: Yes. Now, I had underscored because I don't know that I had realized the sad and surprising and terrible way that the very talented remote viewer, Pat Price, passed from this dimension. Working backwards from that, I wondered if you could share with the audience the strange way that Pat Price came into remote viewing and working with Hal Puthoff and others and the talents that he had. What happened at the end of his life?

Annie: You know, Pat Price is such a mystery. I mean, anyone that you speak to who was involved in the program's in the 1970s will tell you that Pat Price was the most talented remote viewer that they ever worked with. They talk about him. You know, he's way up on the pedestal. Kit Green worked with him at length and Kit Green was very interested in studying Pat Price's physiology. I write in the book about a couple of really strange instances in which Green acted as the handler for Pat Price during one of these remote viewing experiences when Price had a heart attack or heart event, if you will.

But you know, the way in which Pat Price came into the program is so mysterious. Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff set off from the office one day around Christmas in 1973, to go get a Christmas tree nearby in the next suburb over at a Christmas tree farm. There's Pat Price, with his kind of grizzled face, spry smile. He's short. He's in his mid-50s, and he says, “If you ever need any help, I can handle anything.” And he kind of metaphorically winks. And both Swann and Price are perplexed by it, like, “What do you mean?” And Price says, “I know about the psychic research program.”

Well, flash forward a couple months later. Puthoff is in a conundrum with Ingo Swann trying to remote view what turns out to be an NSA underground facility back East, and the phone rings. It's Pat Price saying, “I can help.”

I mean, it's so uncanny, you kind of either think — and this is before the days of cell phones. I write the story out at length, and it leaves you wondering. It certainly left the skeptics going, “Yeah, right.” But it is so weird, and there's numerous explanations for it. People have their own opinion.

Sort of the end of the story, the sad tragic end — you're absolutely right — well, Pat Price, first he gets secreted away from SRI, from being under Hal Puthoff's domain, if you will. The CIA begins working with him themselves. Price doesn't tell Puthoff that. Hal finds that out later. And Price was back in Washington working with the CIA secretly. On the way back to the West Coast where he lives, he stops in Las Vegas to gamble. He invites some friends to gamble with him.

He says, “I'm not feeling well.” He goes to his hotel room. When the friends come to check on him, they find he's had a heart attack. He's dead.

Kit Green gets wind of it, and in my interview with Green, he explained very dramatically going out to the hospital. You know, how did Pat Price die? All kinds of rumors about it. Did the Soviets kill him? Did the CIA kill him? I mean, this remains a great mystery.

On the record in a great many places were reports that his body disappeared or he was cremated. Both Green and Puthoff say that's not the case. They said, “We saw his body.” There are mysteries upon mysteries upon mysteries about Pat Price.

Jacques Vallee (astronomer, UFO investigator) told me that he believes — and I found documents in CIA declassified archives to support that there's even a suggestion that the Church of Scientology was running Pat Price for their own insider intelligence purposes.

I mean, there is no answer. It's a mystery.

John Burroughs: Annie, in our last half hour, I'd like to go into the Soviet threat. And as we're going to break, I want to read a quote in your book. It was from a Soviet scientist, and you talked about how the Soviets went from considering the occult to a weapon.

This one particular scientist that got the attention of the CIA and furthered their program stated this, “The discovery of the energy underlying telepathic communications will be the equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy.”

Annie: Yes. I think his name is Leonid Vasiliev.

[ Editor's Note: Leonid Leonidovich Vasiliev (1891-1966) was a Russian Soviet parapsychologist and physiologist. He worked as a Professor of Physiology at Leningrad University. He helped establish the first parapsychology laboratory at Leningrad. Vasiliev conducted experiments with subjects into telepathy and reported successful results. Vasiliev's book Experiments in Mental Suggestion was translated into English in 1963 and was popular with Western parapsychologists.]

John: Right. And the thing is, in your book when Kit Green and Dr. Nolan (Stanford University) talked, one of the genes they're looking for is the telepathy gene, correct?

Annie: I think you could infer that because it's that same cluster they call the “antenna” that deals with people who have anomalous mental capacities.

Linda: Like you, John. And we'll pick this up on the other side of the break.

Continued in Part 3 with PHENOMENON Radio mp3
audio and special end section about why John Burroughs's
USAF medical records are still classified.